Category Archives: Players

2007 Season, Players

Guess the pitcher

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Do you want to play a game?

In classic Rob Neyer style, let’s do a little Player A vs Player B

Both performances are from relief pitchers prior to their 29th birthday. Both players had pretty uninspiring starts to their careers, bouncing between the majors and minors. But player B had a pretty clear advantage with the exception that he walked a couple more batters.

Player A is former Tiger lefty Jamie Walker. Walker was signed as a minor league free agent by Detroit after toiling in the minors for 3 years following his age 26 season. Walker of course went on to be a mainstay in the Tigers bullpen before heading to Baltimore and he’s one of the arms the Tigers are probably missing this year.

Player B is current Tiger lefty Bobby Seay. Seay was signed by the Tigers as a minor league free agent prior to the 2006 season after several short stints in the majors. The most recent having come in Colorado where he surrendered 11 runs in 11 2/3 innings on 3 homers.

Seay is going to be called on to help fill the void left by the departure of Walker and the injury to Joel Zumaya. So far this year he has been up to the task allowing only 6 baserunners in 9 2/3 innings. He has a decent career strikeout rate and has done a decent job keeping the ball in the park. Plus he halved his walk rate last year for Toledo.

Now I don’t mean to imply that Walker’s success will predict success for Seay. Afterall, there wasn’t a whole lot to like about Walker’s numbers and there are probably far more pitchers who had similar numbers and failed than who went on to get $12 million contracts. Plus I cherry-picked the stats I wanted. But I just wanted to point out that Seay has some favorable indicators and could be come a valuable member of the pen.

2007 Season, Offense, Players

Contacting Polanco

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This is something that I actually started tracking a few days ago, but Placido Polanco is off to quite the start this year making contact. Polanco has always been a tough strike out, and for his career he’s made contact with 91% of his swings. For some context, the average is 80%. But this year has been different for Polanco. Going into Monday’s game, Polanco was at 98% with only 3 swings and misses.

Sean Forman, who has loads of data available at Baseball Reference provided a list of the top seasonal contact percentages for which there is data available.

Wade Boggs and Marty Barrett are the only players to sustain that kind of contact rate over an entire season. But given Polanco’s history and approach it seems that he could hang with this group for awhile.

Looking at the names on the list, a super high contact rate doesn’t really spell success, but these are pretty incredible regardless.

Now as I was typing this up tonight, Polanco picked up just his 4th whiff of the season. That swing-and-miss broke a streak that, by my count, totaled 113 consecutive swings with contact. That dated back to an April 11th game, also with the Orioles. It’s a streak that was pretty much meaningless, yet amazing at the same time.

2007 Season, Pitching, Players, Research

A different look at Zumaya’s outing

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I think everyone was mighty blown away by Joel Zumaya’s 2 inning save last night. He pounded the strike zone with 100mph plus heaters and buckled knees with his curve ball. But just for fun, and because we can, let’s take a look at all the pitches that made up his night.

I don’t know if you noticed in the playoffs last year, but MLB Gameday started using an enhanced version that had camera’s catching the path of the pitch, the velocity, and the release point. This was kind of a neat feature, but what makes it gold is that the data is captured and stored on MLB.com’s servers. Inspired by the book Baseball Hacks: Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics, and with some programming of my own, I worked this offseason to be able to capture and analyze this data. Imagine my disappointment when after the first 8 games the Tigers hadn’t had an “enhanced” game. Fortunately they did last night.
Continue reading A different look at Zumaya’s outing →

2007 Season, Players

Inge’s Struggles

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Inge

There always seems to be somebody who struggles to get going every year. This year the unfortunate soul is Brandon Inge. Here we are a week into the season and Inge has extended his hitless streak to 0 for 20.

Brandon was quoted in today’s paper as saying that his swing was real close, and that he’s just in a bad spell:

“I’m taking perfect swings,” said Inge, who is still searching for his first hit of the season after 17 official at-bats. “I think they’re cheating. They’ve got 20 infielders and outfielders out there.

As happy as I am that Inge isn’t worried, this outsider doesn’t see a swing that is close. Inge has fanned 8 times accounting for 40% of his outs. His contact rate is at 71% which is well below his career rate of 77%. And as of the other 12 at-bats, only 4 balls left the infield and those were routine fly balls. He did have one smash to second base, in which he was rewarded because the 2nd baseman couldn’t handle it.

Plus the fact that Inge struggled in spring training, hitting only 258 and slugging 355, makes me think something is amiss with his swing.

Now what’s really interesting is that it might not be entirely his swing that is the problem. Has Inge become – dare I say it – too patient? The bright spot in the spring was the 10 walks he drew to garner a .365 OBP. He’s drawn 3 walks in 2007 despite not hitting well at all.
Continue reading Inge’s Struggles →

2007 Season, Players

Jose Mesa suspended 2 games

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I apologize if this is old news, but I just saw in today’s press notes that Jose Mesa will be suspended for the first 2 games of the season for an incident last year.

On September 19th he was ejected and ultimately suspended 3 games for throwing at Mark Sweeney. Mesa appealed the suspension. With it being late in the year I’m guessing the appeal probably wasn’t heard until the offseason, thus the carryover effect for 2007.

2007 Season, Players, Spring Training

Oh-mar

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If you peruse the Tigers spring training stats, you’ll see a roster full of guys with some pretty impressive numbers. Sure, Carlos Guillen is slumping a little but his 8:6 K:BB ratio is still favorable. But if you look at Omar Infante this spring, there isn’t much to like.

Infante has a 172/179/250 line thus far. He’s fanned 12 times in 64 at-bats and only picked up one walk. He has no stolen bases. He has more errors (4) than extra base hits (3).

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been following Infante everyday, so I don’t know if this has been a March-long slump or a nosedive the last 2 weeks. I do know that a third of his strikeouts came the last 2 games. Either way he’s not building towards the regular season at this point.

Now you never want to make too much out of spring training stats, but you hope to see something encouraging. Since Infante is slated to be the first guy off the bench to spell Inge, Polanco, and Granderson he will get a reasonable amount of playing time.

In Infante’s limited career, he’s been an every-other-year kind of guy. He struggled a ton in 2003, rebounded in 2004, struggled enough in 2005 to warrant trading for Polanco (I know Urbina helped negotiate that deal as well), and did okay as the super sub last year.

At 25 years old anything can still happen with his career. But avoiding a down year could be a big step for Infante – at least if he wants to be more than a career back-up.

Fan Experience, Players

Blog Grandy Blog

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I’m really enjoying Curtis Granderson’s new blog.

I particularly enjoyed yesterday’s post where after talking about his NCAA bracket, he wrote about the refinements to his swing:

Even with all the March Madness going on with college hoops we are still working very hard on the field, and I’m still trying to iron out my new swing and approach this spring training. Basically what I’m trying to do is make my swing as simple as possible and eliminate as much wasted movement as possible. Since college I’ve always been different than most hitters in terms of my stance, but it worked for me. Over time I started running into problems when timing issues and consistency from day to day. So working with Lloyd McClendon (new hitting coach), we’ve tried to simplify my swing and make it as normal to a major league swing as possible. The idea behind it is that on good or bad days, if I can keep it simple, it’s easier to correct mistakes. It will hopefully also help my approach with two strikes and hopefully make it easier to not only put the ball in play, but hit the ball hard with two strikes.

And really, it’s worth clicking through to the post to see the picture alone.

I didn’t know at first if he was the one actually updating it (not that he isn’t capabable, just that it takes time doing this blogging thing), but after the last few posts it definitely seems to be his voice. With a little more downtime this spring, he’s been updating every few days with rather lengthy posts. The fact that the updates coincide with days he doesn’t travel to away games lends even more credence to the fact that it is his voice.

Other Stuff

  • If you haven’t seen it mentioned on the other Tigers blogs, Ian of Sweaty Men Endeavors, is the new chief blogger at the Tigers SB Nation site Bless You Boys. Ian is awesomely funny and writes the best news aggregation posts in the business. Stop by and say hi at his new gig.
  • Good luck if you entered into the drawing for Opening Day tickets. You’re one of 158,000 who will be hoping to snag one of the thousand or so tickets (including SRO) being made available. The Tigers season ticket sales are up to 18,300 full season equivalents – from 9500 last year – and they’ve sold out of the 27 game packages. You’ll hear by Friday if you won. Tickets are still available for the second game of the year on April 4th when the ring ceremony will take place. That might not be a bad consolation prize. But if you really want to get to Opening Day, tickets are up to $157.50 on StubHub.
Contracts, Players

The Guillen Gamble

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Carlos Guillen
credit Roger DeWitt

The biggest story out of the Tigers camp right now is a possible contract extension for Carlos Guillen. Michael Young’s 5 year $80 million deal certainly helped to stir the pot. I think that gambling on Guillen is something the Tigers need to do.

Drew Sharp says to let Guillen walk if he wants Michael Young money and years. That’s great, but who do you want playing shortstop then? Before spending really boomed, Orlando Cabrera was inked to a 4 year $32 million deal to play shortstop at the age of 30. The same Orlando Cabrera who has Deivi Cruz and Neifi Perez listed as comparables. This past offseason 30 year old Julio Lugo signed a deal that will pay him $9 million per for 4 years. Granted those deals are substantially less than Young’s contract, but it is still far from cheap.
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2006 Season, Pitching, Players, Playoffs

Kenny Rogers extra giddy-up

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Here’s a fascinating post looking at Kenny Rogers stellar playoff performances.

The author uses video to break down Kenny’s mechanics and demonstrate the extra effort and the quicker tempo Rogers was throwing with against the Yankees. Particularly interesting was the video comparison showing a regular season start and the Yankees playoff start. Rogers rushed his delivery considerably in the playoffs and the result was a significantly faster fastball.

Now I’m pretty sure that Kenny Rogers couldn’t throw like this and make it through a whole season. So don’t be looking for crazy-angry-emotional Kenny in a midseason tilt against the Royals. But in the process he probably learned something about himself that he can draw on in tough situations.

Offense, Players, Statistics

Curtis Granderson and his strike outs

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Don’t know if you’ve been following the news out of Lakeland, but it appears that Curtis Granderson struck out a lot last year. It also appears that a goal of the organization is that he strike out less this year. Essentially he just needs to make better contact. And changes in his

There has been a ton of interesting discourse about this over the last few days. Jason Beck notes Granderson comes in with a retooled swing that cuts down on extra movement. John Lowe points out that striking out a lot isn’t necessarily bad, just look at Grady Sizemore.

Leyland made a whole lot of sense when meeting with reporters on Thursday on the subject:

I think he (Granderson) will cut down some (on strikeouts) because he’s going to be a more mature player. But I don’t want to turn him into some get-a-walk, Punch-and-Judy type of guy.”

“I’ve never known how to figure it out. We tell our hitters to be aggressive all the time, and at the same time we tell them, ‘Work the pitcher.’ “

Lowe also quotes Granderson identifying that a more aggressive approach may actually lead to fewer strikeouts

“The simple approach is that if I stay aggressive, I’ll hit less often with two strikes in the count,” he said. “I’ve been aggressive, but I’ve missed pitches. If I can put them in play earlier in the count, I eliminate the two-strike approach.”

I really agree with this. We’ve seen that hitting with 2 strikes is no picnic, and once the at-bat reaches 2 strikes it was over pretty quick for Granderson.

So there is some good stuff on the theory front, but what do the stats say? Detroit Tiger Tales looked at K/BB ratios for the whole team, and Granderson’s K’s out weight his decent walk total and push him into the bottom half of the league. But let’s look a little deeper still…
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Injuries, Players

All Zumaya Linking

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You’ve probably all heard that Joel Zumaya just won’t give up Guitar Hero.If you want my feelings on this, Roar of the Tigers has summed them up perfectly.

The issue is no longer whether or not Guitar Hero is indeed the sole source of his arm trouble. The point is that it MIGHT contribute, that the trainers have some inkling that it can do so, that they have TOLD Zoom about this, so he is AWARE of the issue, and he STILL INSISTS ON PLAYING THE BLOODY GAME.

I understand that he enjoys the game but, Zoom? YOU MISSED PART OF THE POSTSEASON LAST YEAR. THE POSTSEASON. THE THING THAT THE TIGERS HADN’T BEEN TO IN A QUADRILLION YEARS AND IT WAS A MAGICAL FACT THAT THEY WERE THERE AT ALL AND YOU MISSED IT. YOU MISSED IT BECAUSE YOUR ARM WAS SORE AND THIS MIGHT, MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH GUITAR HERO.

Joel Zumaya at spring training
Joel Zumaya – credit Roger DeWitt

I’m not even that bothered that he missed the A’s series last year. I can understand a situation where after the first time they say – “Joel, I think this video game is messing with your wrist” and Joel thinking “No way.”

He’s young and full of confidence and it is certainly understandable. But after the recurrence in the playoffs, maybe the light bulb should have gone on. The risk-reward proposition here just doesn’t seem worth it. I’m certainly not hating on Zumaya. I just want Joel to have a long and successful career, hopefully for the Tigers. And what may be missing from the story is mention of the various wrist strengthening exercises that Joel may be doing to guard against this – in case it is the fact he grips the ball too hard.

That’s not to say he doesn’t care about performing well. He’s been in Lakeland a couple weeks already. And via Jason Beck there was an interesting NY times piece about Joel Zumaya, Barry Zito, and others using yoga and meditation as a regular part of their offseason regimen. I knew that Zito and Zumaya had trained together a couple years ago and that Zumaya added speed because of these works outs. I didn’t know this is what those workouts were, and still are.

And finally some neat stories from Jon Paul Morosi today about when last seasons success all sank in. Oh yeah, and Zumaya is engaged.

UPDATE: I neglected to include this link to D-Town baseball which opines on whether Zumaya should be starting or in the pen. Up until the drafting of Andrew Miller and emergence of Jurrjens and Vasquez I thought he should at least be given a shot as a starter. Right now that need doesn’t seem as pressing so I’m content with him in his current high leverage-multi inning role. But I have heard of some talk that he might be looked at as a starter again.